Reef alarmists jump the shark

Perhaps the claim most likely to raise an eyebrow is the declaration that, "The authors declare no conflict of interest."

All the authors have in fact been beneficiaries of generous research grants to study purported environmental threats to the GBR and are almost certain to receive future funding should their recommendations for further such research be implemented. While there is nothing improper about this situation, to formally declare there is no conflict of interest will strike some as making a farce of the declaration and even the very concept.

Is this just another appeal for funding?

There is abundant reason to question the validity of the findings. The imminent demise of the GBR has been an ongoing claim for nearly half a century and has funded a small industry of researchers, bureaucrats and activists devoted to "saving" the Great Barrier Reef from a variety of imagined "threats". In recent decades this industry has cost the Australian taxpayer well over $100 million per year and the cost has been increasing. Although no practical solutions have ever been found, the demand for hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems seems unlimited.

If this situation were based on a conscious deliberate fraud, it would be bad enough; but, unfortunately it involves something even worse. It arises from a widespread and profound groupthink belief that the reef really is under dire threat and that all the money and effort is actually "saving" it from destruction. Even so, this latest study has implications well beyond just another appeal for funding and deserves to be given serious consideration.

What if for once the experts are right?

The core claim is that the reef has lost half of its coral in the past 27 years and that

Without significant changes to the rates of disturbance and coral growth, coral cover in the central and southern regions of the GBR is likely to decline to 5–10% by 2022.

If this is true, the implications for future research and management are profound. It means that the current condition of the GBR is essentially no better than that of the heavily exploited and effectively unmanaged reefs of the Caribbean or SE Asia. It means all the money and effort that has gone into management and research has been an abject failure. It means that the promised "resilience" to environmental impacts that was the major justification for greatly expanded green zones and sundry other stringent and costly restrictions on productive usage have achieved nothing, and that the vaunted resilience has been just another theoretical academic fantasy. It means that the claims of having the best managed reefs in the world have been only a self-serving delusion. It means that all the past assertions of successful management have been untrue and the research supposedly supporting it has been either grossly incompetent or a deliberate misrepresentation.

Worse still, this all took place when, for nearly three decades the reef, was supposedly dying off in clear view of all the experts and they even had the surveys to confirm it. Were they too slack to look at their data until now or did they hide it because it didn't suit their agenda at the time? If they were that incompetent or dishonest in the past, why should we now believe them now?

The high cost of providing a permanent reef holiday

Between the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cook University, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Queensland Fisheries and the Reef Rescue Program, public expenditure on saving the GBR now totals almost $200 million per year. In the private sector the cost of compliance is comparable or even greater. Much greater still is the ongoing costs and constraints on production, profitability and future development across all primary industries.